Cloud computing has risen in prominence over the last decade. “Throughout the next five years, a 44% annual growth in workloads for the public Cloud versus an 8.9% growth for “on-premise” computing workloads is expected.” (Woods, 2014, SiliconAngle). More than 60% of businesses utilize the Cloud for performing IT-related operations.” (Woods, 2014, SiliconAngle). “Cisco forecasts that global data center traffic will triple from 2.6 zettabytes in 2012 to 7.7 zettabytes annually in 2017, representing a 25 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR)” (Woods, 2014, SiliconAngle). “From 2012 to 2017, data center workloads will grow 2.3-fold; Cloud workloads will grow 3.7-fold” (Woods, 2014, SiliconAngle). Presently data centers comprise 3% of the electric power load (Chalise et al, 2015, IEEE).
Energy sources including renewables and energy efficiency must scale with the data center growth rate. Today's land based data centers require a great deal of fore planning with months to years build out, frequently with voluminous water consumption in chilled water evaporation where server density is limited by cooling capacity. Furthermore data centers can take up large parcels of land and operate with poor power utilization efficiency (PUE), all the while requiring high operational reliability and often necessitating on-site backup power generators and fuel supply among other redundancies.
The various implementations and types of data centers are readily apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,278,273 to Whitted discusses a modular data center with modular components suitable for use with rack mounted or shelf mounted computing systems. The modular data center is housed in an intermodal shipping container and computing systems mounted within the container are arranged to be shipped and operated within the container. The modular data center includes a temperature control system for maintaining the air temperature surrounding the computing systems.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,525,207 to Clidaras et al. describes a ship outfitted with computer servers located in shipping containers, which are cooled by ocean water that is pumped through heat exchangers. Electric power is supplied by wave or marine current electric power generating devices connected by power cables to the ship. Such a floating vessel is vulnerable to extreme weather and sea states. Ocean vessel operators typically steer away from areas where intense storms and/or destructive wave action are present or incoming, in order to avoid potential damage to their vessels and cargo. Following this precedent would require severing the data center connections to shore impacting its reliability and availability.